50. Anxiety and the Body: Part 2
Last post, we covered the ways our nervous system’s fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses present themselves in day-to-day living when you struggle with chronic anxiety. In this post, we’ll discuss some important ways to practice compassion for yourself when this happens, and how to bring yourself out of your survival response into an intentional response. Let’s get at it!
Example: If you grew up in an environment with a lot of instability and arguing, you may have survived by numbing yourself to your surroundings (freeze). You may have disconnected from your feelings because they were too painful and you didn’t have a safe way to process them. As you grow up, you may move out, start a career, find new friends, and move on with your life. But because you had spent so many years being so disconnected from yourself and your emotions, you may continue to numb your way through life even though, logically, you don’t have to anymore. You may have supportive friends, a healthy relationship, and all the stability you need, yet you find yourself almost sleepwalking through life. You may go about your daily routines but never really take risks or try anything new. You may spend most nights zoning out in front of the TV and scrolling through your phone. You may have difficulty connecting and communicating with your significant other, and they may call you “distant” or “closed off.” Your mind may go blank and you struggle to remember details of conversations afterwards. You may internalize a sense of shame and inadequacy because you feel like there’s something wrong with you. You may struggle to feel much of anything at all.
Meanwhile, the person you are underneath the freeze mode, is someone passionate and empathetic and who wants to be alive to their life. But you get frustrated with yourself over and over because you just keep getting stuck in your anxiety and stress response and don’t know how to bring yourself out of it.
Whether you get stuck in fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or any combination of the above, the first step is to remember that you are operating out of your primal, animalistic, survival brain. Animals don’t have the ability for rational thinking and, when you’re just trying to survive, you don’t either. You will do things you’re embarrassed about, ashamed of, and frustrated with when you operate out of your survival responses. You’ll criticize yourself, feel like there’s something wrong with you, wonder why you can’t just “get it together.” So, the first step is to interrupt the self-criticism and remind yourself that your body is doing what it feels is necessary to help you survive.
In our example, you survived by disconnecting from your feelings. As an adult, you don’t have to anymore, but your nervous system hasn’t caught the message. It is so used to operating in a specific way, that it’s going to take time, patience, and intentionality to change the cycle. So, just begin with kindness, compassion, and reminding yourself of what’s true. Notice when you are operating out of survival mode. Become aware of your warning signs - perhaps it’s lashing out for no obvious reason, mindlessly scrolling more often than you’d like, feeling caught in your to-do list and like you can’t relax, people-pleasing, chronic indecisiveness, running from conflict…there are so many warnings signs and they can look so different from person to person. If you have a safe, trusted person in your life, talk to them about what your signs are and ask them to kindly point it out to you when they see you slip into survival mode.
Once you become aware that you are in survival mode, just notice it without judgment, shame, or criticism. To do this, just pretend you’re a casual bystander: “Oh look, survival mode is back. Hi, survival mode.” You can even express gratitude for your survival mode, because, after all, it did help keep you safe and cope with stress for a long time.
Your next step is to ask your body what it needs. I think that a common place where people get stuck is when they try to calm their system down when it’s not yet ready to calm down. People may say that they tried deep breathing or yoga and it wasn’t helpful. This could be because you first need to release the excess energy from your body, or wake your body up, before calming it down. Perhaps exercising (including just going for a walk), cleaning, or simply jumping up and down or swinging your arms or shouting can do the trick. You can do “ohms” from yoga (which helps massage the central nervous system), jog in place, run up and down stairs, or power pose (standing with back straight and chin up, looking forward, shoulders back, feet a little wider than hip distance apart, hands either on hips or extending diagonally upward - think “Victory!!!”; and hold the pose for two minutes).
Once you’ve gotten the excess energy worked out of your body, you can do grounding and mindfulness exercises to help you calm and connect with your body. Some good exercises are deep breathing (place one hand on your stomach and the other on your chest and make sure your breaths fill your stomach up - really pay attention to how your breaths feel entering and exiting your body). Another great breathing exercise is the 4-7-8 technique (breathe in deeply for a count of 4, hold for a count of 7, and exhale for a count of 8 - then repeat this cycle at least 3 times and as many as you need to help your body feel calm). No matter how you breathe, try to make sure you exhale for at least one count longer than you inhale - this way you spend more time exhaling and releasing the stress from your body instead of taking it in.
Other grounding and mindfulness exercises allow you to simply focus on being present to the situation in front of you instead of being lost in your thoughts. You can tune into your specific senses, noticing 5 things you see, 5 things you hear, and 5 things you feel. You can notice everything around you that’s a specific color. You can listen to sounds furthest away from you and gradually bring your awareness closer to the sounds nearest to you, eventually just listening to the sound of your own breathing. Or you can just be present to whatever feels natural. You don’t have to do a structured mindfulness exercise if that feels like more work than you need. Just do what feels right and calm for you.
Another calming technique to try is practicing helpful affirmations. This one can be tricky. You want to make sure the affirmations are statements that are true, helpful, and things you genuinely believe on some level. For example, if you are anxious about a difficult conversation coming up, it probably wouldn’t be true to say, “I am amazing at handling conflict.” Instead, you could say, “I am a good listener and I care about this person.” This allows you to focus not on saying the perfect thing and handling the conflict in the perfect way, but on listening to and caring for the other person - which will naturally help you feel less anxious. I once had a counselor tell me to use the affirmations, “All is well” and “This too shall pass.” But those weren’t helpful for me, because I was in the midst of a really difficult season of uncertainty and transition. All really wasn’t well, and it wasn’t just going to pass on its own - I had to be intentional and do the work to get through it. A more helpful affirmation could have been, “This is a tough season, and I deserve to give myself what I need to get through it.” Even a simple, “This is tough, but I am smart and resilient.” You’re not trying to convince yourself of something that isn’t true and you don’t believe. You just need to say something that feels comforting and is also true, and this helps your system feel calmer and safer. If you feel insecure about your looks, saying “I am beautiful” isn’t likely to help. But is there any specific thing about your looks that you do like - maybe the color of your eyes, the texture of your hair, your smile? Or perhaps something about yourself as a person that you genuinely love - your compassionate heart, your sense of humor, your intelligence and problem-solving abilities? Focus on that. Remind yourself of that. This will help you feel a little more secure.
It’s also important to remember that the goal is not to get to a completely calm, chill, zen state. It’s just to bring your brain out of survival mode and into a state where you can think rationally and be yourself. Anxiety is a natural feeling when facing a difficult, stressful, or high-stakes situation. You don’t need to go into that job interview or that difficult conversation feeling totally mellow, but you can channel that anxiety into focused energy on what you’re about to do. A healthy amount of anxiety shows that you care. It’s your nervous system preparing you to do your best. We just need to get to a state where we can be in control of our behavior, be self-aware and adaptable as needed, and really just bring the best we can to the situation in front of us.
